“Bookkeeping gives one a head for figures. All right, Thomas Jefferson was born April 13, 1743, new style calendar. Remember, everyone but the Russians moved up to the Gregorian calendar from the Julian. By the old style he was born on April 2. Must have been fun for all those people all over Europe and the New World to get two birthdays, so to speak. Well, Cynthia, he was born into a world of slavery. If you read history at all, you realize that every great civilization undergoes a protracted period of slavery. It’s the only way the work can get done and capital can be accumulated. Imagine if the pharaohs had had to pay labor for the construction of the pyramids.”
“I never thought of it that way.” Cynthia raised her eyebrows.
“Slaves have typically been those who were conquered in battle. In the case of the Romans, many of their slaves were Greeks, most of whom were far better educated than their captors, and the Romans expected their Greek slaves to tutor them. And the Greeks themselves often had Greek slaves, those captured from battles with otherpoleis, or city-states. Well, our slaves were no different in that they were the losers in war, but the twist for America came in this fashion: The slaves that came to America were the losers in tribal wars in Africa and were sold to the Portuguese by the leaders of the victorious tribes. See, by that time the world had shrunk, so to speak. Lower Africa had contact with Europe, and the products of Europe enticed people everywhere. After a while other Europeans elbowed in on the trade and sailed to South America, the Caribbean, and North America with their human cargo. They even began to bag some trophies themselves—you know, if the wars slowed down. Demand for labor was heavy in the New World.”
“Mrs. Hogendobber, what does this have to do with Thomas Jefferson?”
“Two things. He grew up in a society where most people considered slavery normal. And two—and this still plagues us today—the conquered, the slaves, were not Europeans, they were Africans. They couldn’t pass. You see?”
Cynthia bit her pencil eraser again.“I’m beginning to get the picture.”
“Even if a slave bought his or her way to freedom or was granted freedom, or even if the African started as a free person, he or she never looked like a Caucasian. Unlike the Romans and the Greeks, whose slaves were other European tribes or usually other indigenous Caucasian peoples, a stigma attached to slavery in America because it was automatically attached to the color of the skin—with terrible consequences.”
Harry jumped in.“But he believed in liberty. He thought slavery cruel, yet he couldn’t live without his own slaves. Oh, sure, he treated them handsomely and they were loyal to him because he looked after them so well compared to many other slave owners of the period. So he was trapped. He couldn’t imagine scaling down. Virginians then and today still conceive of themselves as English lords and ladies. That translates into a high, high standard of living.”
“One that bankrupted him.” Mrs. Hogendobber nodded her head in sadness. “And saddled his heirs.”
“Yeah, but what was most interesting about Jefferson, to me anyway, was his insight into what slavery does to people. He said it destroyed the industry of the masters while degrading the victim. It sapped the foundation of liberty. He absolutely believed that freedom was a gift from God and the right of all men. So he favored a plan of gradual emancipation. Nobody listened, of course.”
“Did other people have to bankrupt themselves?”
“You have to remember that the generation that fought the Revolutionary War, for all practical purposes, saw their currency devalued and finally destroyed. The only real security was land, I guess.” Mrs. Hogendobber thought out loud. “Jefferson lost a lot. James Madison struggled with heavy debt as well as with the contradictions of slavery his whole life, and Dolley was forced to sell Montpelier, his mother’s and later their home, after his death. Speaking of slavery, one of James’s slaves, who loved Dolley like a mother, gave her his life savings and continued to live with her andwork for her. As you can see, the emotions between the master or the mistress and the slave were highly complex. People loved one another across a chasm of injustice. I fear we’ve lost that.”
“We’ll have to learn to love one another as equals,” Harry solemnly said. “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ ”
“History. I hated history when I was in college. You two bring it to life.” Cynthia praised them and their short course on Jefferson.
“It is alive. These walls breathe. Everything that everyone did or did not do throughout the course of human life on earth impacts us. Everything!” Mrs. Hogendobber was impassioned.
Harry, spellbound by Mrs. Hogendobber, heard an owl hoot outside, the low, mournful sound breaking the spell and reminding her of Athena, goddess of wisdom, to whom the owl was sacred. Wisdom was born of the night, of solitary and deep thought. It was so obvious, so clearly obvious to the Greeks and those who used mythological metaphors for thousands of years. She just got it. She started to share her revelation when she spied a copy of Dumas Malone’s magisterial series on the life of Thomas Jefferson. It was the final volume, the sixth,The Sage of Monticello.
“I don’t remember this book being here.”
Mrs. Hogendobber noticed the book on the chair. The other five volumes rested in the milk crates that served as bookcases.“It wasn’t.”
“Here.” Harry opened to a page which Kimball had marked by using the little heavy gray paper divider found in boxes of teabags. “Look at this.”
Cynthia and Mrs. Hogendobber crowded around the book, where on page 513 Kimball had underlined with a pink highlighter,“All five of the slaves freed under Jefferson’s will were members of this family; others of them previously had been freed or, if able to pass as white, allowed to run away.”
“‘Allowed to run away’!” Mrs. Hogendobber read aloud.
“It’s complicated, Cynthia, but this refers to the Hemings family. Thomas Jefferson had been accused by his political enemies, the Federalists, of having an affair of many years’ duration with Sally Hemings. We don’t think he did, but the slaves declared that Sally was the mistress of PeterCarr, Thomas’s favorite nephew, whom he raised as a son.”
“But the key here is that Sally’s mother, also a beautiful woman, was half white to begin with. Her name was Betty, and her lover, again according to oral slave tradition as well as what Thomas Jefferson Randolph said, was John Wayles, Jefferson’swife’s brother. You see the bind Jefferson was in. For fifty years that man lived with this abuse heaped on his head.”
“Allowed to run away,” Harry whispered. “Miranda, we’re on second base.”
“Yeah, but who’s going to come to bat?” Cooper scratched her head.
46
The Coleses’ library yielded little that they didn’t already know. Mrs. Hogendobber came across a puzzling reference to Edward Coles, secretary to James Madison and then the first governor of the Illinois Territory. Edward, called Ned, never married or sired children. Other Coleses carried on that task. But a letter dated 1823 made reference to a great kindness he performed for Patsy. Jefferson’s daughter? The kindness was not clarified.
When the little band of researchers left, Samson merrily waved them off after offering them generous liquid excitements. Lucinda, too, waved.
After the squad car disappeared, Lucinda walked back into the library. She noticed the account book was not on the bottom shelf. She had not helped Harry, Miranda, and Cynthia go over the records because she had an appointment in Charlottesville, and Samson had seemed almost overeager to perform the niceties.